Like other Legislatures, Congress has power to abate nuisances--to remove or tear down unsafe buildings--to destroy infected cargoes--to lay injunctions upon manufactories injurious to the public health--and thus to "provide for the common defence and general welfare" by destroying individual property, when such property puts in jeopardy the public weal. Granting, for argument's sake, that slaves are "property" in the District of Columbia--if Congress has a right to annihilate property there when the public safety requires it, it may annihilate its existence _as_ property when the public safety requires it, especially if it transform into a _protection_ and _defence_ that which as _property_ perilled the public interests. In the District of Columbia there are, besides the United States' Capitol, the President's house, the national offices, and archives of the Departments of State, Treasury, War, and Navy, the General Post-office, and Patent office. It is also the residence of the President, of all the highest officers of the government, of both houses of Congress, and of all the foreign ambassadors. In this same District there are also seven thousand slaves. Jefferson, in his Notes on Va. p. 241, says of slavery, that "the State permitting one half of its citizens to trample on the rights of the other, transforms them into _enemies_;" and Richard Henry Lee, in the Va. House of Burgesses in 1758, declared that to those who held them, "_slaves must be natural enemies_." Is Congress so impotent that it _cannot_ exercise that right pronounced both by municipal and national law, the most sacred and universal--the right of self-preservation and defence? Is it shut up to the _necessity_ of keeping seven thousand "enemies" in the heart of the nation's citadel? Does the iron fiat of the constitution doom it to such imbecility that it _cannot_ arrest the process that _made_ them "enemies," and still goads to deadlier hate by fiery trials, and day by day adds others to their number? Is _this_ providing for the common defence and general welfare? If to rob men of rights excites their hate, freely to restore them and make amends, will win their love.